Brain

What do a patient with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a basketball star, and an animal in captivity have in common? According to new research from Tel Aviv University, they share a clear behavioral link that reduces stress.

Birds may have a more highly developed sense of smell than researchers previously thought, contend scholars who have found that penguins may use smell to determine if they are related to a potential mate.

A new study published in the international journal Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica (AOGS) reveals that fear of childbirth is a predisposing factor for emergency and elective cesarean sections, even after psychological counseling. This may mean a negative experience that lasts a lifetime among the approximately 3% of women who in this study were estimated to suffer from excessive fear of childbirth.

Toxoplasma gondii parasites can invade your bloodstream, break into your brain and prompt behavioral changes from recklessness to neuroticism. These highly contagious protozoa infect more than half the world's population, and most people's immune systems never purge the intruders.

The Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), also known as Morbus Sudeck, is characterised by "disinhibition" of various sensory and motor areas in the brain. A multidisciplinary Bochum-based research group, led by Prof. Dr. Martin Tegenthoff (Bergmannsheil Neurology Department) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Maier (Bergmannsheil Department of Pain Therapy), has now demonstrated for the first time that with unilateral CRPS excitability increases not only in the brain area processing the sense of touch of the affected hand.

Humour therapy is as effective as widely used antipsychotic drugs in managing agitation in patients with dementia – and avoids serious drug side effects, a new study shows.

The first major study of the impact of humour therapy on mood, agitation, behavioural disturbances and social engagement in dementia patients found both short term and persisting decrease in agitation, according to lead researcher, Dr Lee-Fay Low, a Research Fellow in the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales.

There are now more and more foreign children in the classroom, and many of them speak a different language to that of their sociolinguistic environment. A study by the University of Gerona has assessed the knowledge of Catalan and Spanish amongst these children and confirms that they take at least six years to acquire the same language levels as native pupils. Researchers propose a new system that has proven successful in other countries as a way of stopping language from becoming a barrier to academic development.

Administration of the commonly used stimulant drug methylphenidate (Ritalin) was able to speed recovery from general anesthesia in an animal study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The report, appearing in the October issue of Anesthesiology, is the first demonstration in mammals of what could be a safe and effective way to induce arousal from general anesthesia.

Washington, DC — Stimulating a specific region of the brain leads to the production of new brain cells that enhance memory, according to an animal study in the September 21 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings show how deep brain stimulation (DBS) — a clinical intervention that delivers electrical pulses to targeted areas of the brain — may work to improve cognition.

Are you wooed by advertising? Of course you are. After all, it's one thing to go out and buy a new washing machine after the old one exploded, quite another to impulse-buy that 246-inch flat screen TV that just maybe, in hindsight, you didn't really need.

Advertisers come at you in two ways. There is the just-the-facts type of ad, called "logical persuasion," or LP ("This car gets 42 miles to the gallon"), and then there is the ad that circumvents conscious awareness, called "non-rational influence," or NI (a pretty woman, say, draped over a car).

It's a bit of a challenge. But, imagine a microscopic jet vacuum cleaner, the size of a pen nib that hovers over cell surfaces without ever touching them. Then imagine that the soap in the cleaning solution is replaced with various molecules that can be selectively delivered to the cells. This gives you a sense of a new device that researchers believe will serve as a powerful tool to study the behaviour of living cells and a range of crucial cellular processes, from cancer cell formation to how neurons align themselves in the developing brain.

WASHINGTON — Intuition may lead people toward a belief in the divine and help explain why some people have more faith in God than others, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

As one of the leaders of an international research consortium, Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers have discovered that several common genetic variants contribute to a person's risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness. Two just-released studies provide new evidence that 11 genomic regions have a strong correlation with mental illness, including six areas not previously discovered. The researchers also found that some of these DNA variations contribute to both diseases.

The ability to produce neuroprotectors, proteins that protect the human brain against neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and ALS, is the holy grail of brain research. A technology developed at Tel Aviv University does just that, and it's now out of the lab and in hospitals to begin clinical trials with patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – September 19, 2011) The largest study ever of a rare childhood brain tumor found more than half the tumors carried extra copies of specific genes linked to cancer growth, according to research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators.